Steve Schimmrich is a geologist and community college professor in a rural area of the mid-Hudson Valley of New York. All of the opinions expressed here are strictly his own. Sometimes he gets cranky and uses bad words.

While much of the book seems like a straightforward history of nuclear and advanced aircraft testing in the Nevada desert, Jacobsen appears to go off the deep end when she starts discussing the conspiracy theories surrounding the infamous Area 51.

Jacobsen supposed has a source (only one guy, from what I gathered by listening to the interview) who claims, apparently convincingly to her, that the 1947 Roswell UFO "crash" was really part of a Soviet conspiracy.

According to her, two former Third Reich aerospace designers named Walter and Reimar Horten invented a flying disk that Stalin manned with malformed adolescents, surgically altered by the Nazi SS doctor Josef Mengele (and from which we get the iconic alien imagery of small-statured, big-eyed beings). The bodies and craft were all brought to Area 51 where engineers were able to reverse engineer this "hover and fly" technology.

What the fuck? This story has so many holes you could strain pasta with it.

Either Annie Jacobsen is extremely gullible, especially given that this crazy theory is based on one "expert source" or she's cynically trying to sell lots of books. Either way, I was disappointed that Terry Gross wasn't a bit more skeptical of these claims and didn't ask more probing questions about this ridiculous assertion.